Sunday, August 13, 2017
Supremacy Renunciation: Billowing Torches
In Charlottesville, there was a plan to remove this pictured statue of confederate hero Robert E. Lee. The events of the last few days reveal that it’s more than a statue.
Back when BLM was planning to march throughout Hampton Roads and block the streets in protest of police brutality, it was quite evident that police shootings were more than police shootings. Numerous people I am connected to in some way declared they would drive through the crowd if any of the BLM marches blocked the roadways on which they were driving.
Yesterday, someone actually ploughed through those crowds.
In Hampton Roads, VA, it was apparent that the very existence of an organized group of protestors threatened the world and identity of some white people enough for them to make quite irrational, bombastic, and speculative threats to people they don’t even know. In Charlottesville, the very threat of the removal of a symbol of the world and identity of some white people became the gathering point of great rage and bloodshed. These symbols are like billowing torches whose smoke engulfs our history. This history bears the bloody marks of the power of those symbols.
Imagine camping in the wilderness. No light but the moon and stars. You awaken – or are you dreaming? – with your campsite engulfed by radiant smoke of a firepot and the billowing light of a giant torch moving through the center of your campsite. You look up and see the smoke rising to the heavens. You look down and can see that the ground is still moist, saturated with blood spilled from animals of your herd. The raging light that nearly blinds you as you seem to awaken casts itself upon merely the edges of halves of the ram, goat, heifer, and birds whose bisected carcasses lay on either side of the torch and fire. The rest of the animals and campsite are blindly engulfed in darkness and smoke. The torch doesn’t even give light to any face of a man who might be carrying it. A voice from the midst of the fire and smoke, that seems to echo as far as the stars, says: “To your offspring I give this land…”
Photo of Gettysburg, VA Civil War
Symbols matter. Animals who were one body lay in two halves on the blood drenched earth. The voice of the Light fills the space between the two halves, making a newly unified body appear out of the death of the old. A covenant has been sealed. The life blood of the two is now the life of a new One. One God, one people. They stand on the earth. They stand on their life blood. This is why Black Lives Matter.
The fabric of American history has threads that weave in two different directions, but it is all one fabric. The body of the American church lay divided in two halves on the earth as it cries out. “This land” that is soaked in blood belongs to “the offspring” that was given to the ancient camper who symbolically gave his life blood to the formation of the newly unified body of people. Here that body lays on the ground in bloody division. Symbols matter.
I may think I’m not a white nationalist. I’m not alt-right. But my Sunday gatherings don’t look like the gathering of the voice in the wilderness in the midst of two halves re-becoming one. Why not? A Sunday gathering is more than a Sunday gathering. Symbols matter. "For the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him."
What our gathering looks like will say something about what we’re gathering around. White “Christians” have essentially rallied for generations around the phrase, “take our country back.” White “Christians” have essentially chanted through the night of generations with billowing torches screaming, “[You] will not replace us!”
What if we actually gather around Jesus Christ? He is the offspring into whose hands this land was given. He is the light and mystery in whose midst we awaken to heavenly promise. His is the blood in whose sufferings our divisions share. His cry is our lament, our death. His death is also the renunciation of our place at the privileged throne of "this land." Unity starts with white people whose ancestors hung black people from trees instead submitting to them (Phil. 2: 5-11). And, in and out of that submission, that finding of our proper place - rather than being threatened by the loss of our improper place at a false throne - our joy follows after his. His joy becomes our hope, our life.
What if we gather around the cross? Symbols matter.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
